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Comment by girasquid | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: if a gaming company were to distribute a game that had an option where you paid for it and an option where the client partitioned 10% of your capacity for mining (only while playing the game) - how many players would go for the free-but-mining-bitcoins option? If the game client was less greedy about the resources and everything was communicated up front, could this be a way to monetize free to play games without charging the player any real money?

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I was thinking the same thing. However, if this company had infected those thousands of machines, and was presumably mining continuously, and it still was able to make only few thousand dollars, then I guess you'll not be able to get any meaningful revenue by only mining while the game was active.

But I think if you offer a game for free to users with the understanding that their computer will be used to mine bitcoins continuously (but never exceeding, say, 5% CPU), a lot of users will still take you up on the offer. The power of free! I'm not sure if even that revenue will be meaningful, though.

It's my understanding that consumer desktops consume more power than the value of bitcoins that works be mined, so the only advantage to a consumer under that scheme would be not giving payment info to the company.

>It's my understanding that consumer desktops consume more power than the value of bitcoins that works be mined, so the only advantage to a consumer under that scheme would be not giving payment info to the company.

Not giving payment info /is/ a huge advantage, especially for small payments. I mean, even when everyone pays for their own power, I think for payments up to a few dollars a month, people would pay twice as much to not have to deal with giving payment info. (this is different from, but similar to the old payment process of having your computer dial a toll-number to get access, because you have a lot more control over and understanding of how much power your system is drawing. It also won't show up on your phone bill.)

Then, think of the large number of gamers who don't have credit cards, and how many of those folks who don't have credit cards /also/ don't pay for their own electricity.

This sounds like the perfect way for a company that doesn't care about ethics to get children to pay for things.

...and not having to set up a mining operation yourself, manage coins/wallets/etc.

Is bitcoin mining even the most profitable way to convert other people's CPU or even GPU time into money?

What are the other options to convert CPU/GPU processing to money?

That's the million dollar question. I could imagine someone is willing to pay by the cycle for distributed computing, like a commercialized version of folding@home or something. The question is who and how do you turn it into a marketplace.

CoinLab has done exactly that for free-to-play games. Run their client, which mines bit coins when idle, and you earn free in-game currency. I do not think it's been particularly popular so far. It also causes a ton of user confusion and finger pointed at "greedy devs trying to get users to mine coins for them".

Fucking programmers, always expecting to get paid. Why can't they be more like artists and other morons?

They should be happy to be buried up to their eyeballs in debt with useless degrees and a job at starbucks.

My thoughts exactly whenever i read "greedy devs" on Play Store for very very cheap apps. Heck I was just reading a review of notability on PC Mag and they said if you want THESE extra features,l use notability, else the free ones are good enough. (it costs $0.99) So now you're gonna think $1 isn't even justified?

Exactly, 1 dollar is half a cup of the cheapest coffee you can buy in the developed world.

yes, and factor that against the amount of coffee cups it took to make that app... Devs are so undervalued these days. Especially App devs. We so need a labour union of our own!

Every time this comes up in a serious conversation, the only thing I can imagine is someone standing behind a manager saying "no, no, you're trying to create a macro in your spreadsheet - that's a programmer's job!".

Hahahaha not for the bosses, but a union that makes sure devs get properly paid for their hard work.

More like "No, no, no, you're trying to create an inventory management and accounting system in Excel".

I would do it for litecoins although, not bitcoins, since there are no specialized ASICs to make GPU mining worthless. I've calculated there are about 64'000 $300 GPUs (7970) mining on the litecoin network, which isn't a lot.

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